Pappy Jack

Did you follow Mike's links? Here's the relevant part of his post at richarddawkins:

For pity's sake, read these articles and give up this nonsense about the incorporation of pi being anything other than a consequence of the design and building methods used by the Egyptians.

Do you have any idea of the derivation of the Imperial inch at all? Do you know that the French (and several other European nations) used to use the inch? Do you know that the French word for inch is pouce? Do you know what pouce means? Do you know what this says about the derivation of the inch?

Martin Gardner is only an eminent mathematician who has a lot of relevant things to say about the use (and misuse) of numbers. His article is relevant to Smyth's nonsense and you should read it. It's here.

As to the numbers, Dean has already told you that many of them have been fudged or misrepresented in order to fit the desired result. Do you not understand this either? And even if they weren't fudged or misrepresented, the fact that they can be manipulated to produce desired results says more about the obsessions of the manipulators than it does about anything else.

ck1

So why has Sanford not published any of his revolutionary ideas in peer-reviewed scientific journals where other scientists go to find new data and ideas? Is his publisher, Ivan Press, a respected academic publisher?* Does Sanford go to genetics conferences to explain his thesis to other scientists and seek their input?*

Or does he give lectures at churches and sell his books on creationist websites?

*no

Steviepinhead

All we're accumulating is still more "davey-nitions" (or daffynitions, as they have also been called):

genetically superior: dying too young to reproduce, as Crow suggests occurred to those of our stone-age ancestors who had the misfortune of manifesting a genetic disorder.

on the brink of extinction: those fortunate enough to receive the benefits of modern medicine, confined to a minority of the human population over the last century or so (representing an extremely modest fraction of the history of our species), medical care that is not universally available or affordable even in the wealthiest of countries, and which still cannot cope with any number of genetic diseases, afflictions, and parasites.

Keep 'em coming, davey! We couldn't compile this kind of tard without you!

Um, I see you still haven't addressed your earlier claims re: Philitis/Philiton/Philition... And I will keep pointing that out at every reasonable opportunity until you either renounce the claims or provide some sort of coherent support for them.

VoxRat

Heh heh.
I wonder how afdave would try to phrase the question(s) to elicit the answer he wants?

Constant Mews

There is no way to phrase the question to elicit the answer he wants. Crow is not saying what Dave claims he's saying. Dave is quote-mining, and apparently willfully misrepresenting Crow in order to make a point that everyone agrees is incorrect. Whether at this point Dave is driven more by lack of intellectual capacity or sheer pig-headed stubbornness is an open question.

Dave Hawkins

Let me just add that I am not drawing this conclusion from Crow on my own. Dr. Sanford is a highly successful Cornell geneticist who renounced his evolutionary views because of information like this from Crow. If anyone likes I can quote him at length from his preface to prove this. Regarding this paper of Crow's he says ...

ericmurphy

Classic, ck!

ericmurphy

No! You don't say! We never would have guessed if you hadn't told us, Dave.

Which basically means his divorce scrambled his brains in a way that religion obviously can do as well. If you think Sanford is giving your misinterpretation of Crow any sort of credibility, I regret to inform you that it does not. What Crow is saying, Dave, is entirely straightforward, commonplace, common sense, and is a problem that occurred to me before I got to high school. It would occur to anyone who has given the slightest thought to it. That it apparently never occurred to you, Dave, is ominous.

Dave, give it a rest: medical science (why do you think Crow is talking about the past couple of hundred years, not the last couple of thousand years?) interferes with natural selection! Do you think this is news? You couldn't have thought of this on your own? I didn't need Crow to tell me this, and I doubt anyone here other than you needed Crow to tell you this.

This is definitely one of the least defensible misrepresentations of a legitimate scientist's opinion I've ever seen you make, Dave.

VoxRat

afdave, you seem to have a real mental block when it comes to this concept of selection.

Amaleq13

That is unfortunate. I had hopes you would display a willingness to concede your error after it was explicitly described and demonstrated.

Do you honestly not understand the difference between the spontaneous occurrence of deleterious mutations and the reproduction of those spontaneously occurring deleterious mutations?

Your confusion of the two is at the heart of your error.

There is no justification in Crow's article for the notion that our ancestors' genes were superior to modern genes so your assertion of that conclusion is quite clearly unwarranted.

I'm not surprised since you are so clearly wrong.

This is what Crow tells us:
Technology over the last few centuries has allowed many more infants to survive and reproduce. The downside is that some of those surviving infants' genes developed spontaneous deleterious mutations and those can also be reproduced when the infant grows to have its own child. When deleterious mutations are reproduced, they have greater negative impact on a population (see various royal families). Our population grows faster because of technological improvements but at the cost of allowing more deleterious mutations to be reproduced in the gene pool. If those technological improvements were removed, we would be stuck with all those accumulated deleterious mutations that should have been weeded out by natural selection as was the case for our ancestors.

Because of our technological progress we would be in worse genetic shape than our ancestors if we lost access to that technology.

Our ancestors, therefore, had fewer reproducing deleterious mutations because more of their infants died.

You find exactly this stated by Crow just before the section you quoted:

"Until recent times, the size of the human population grew at an extremely slow rate. With the population largely density regulated, something like quasi-truncation selection seems likely. There was a high reproduction rate with a death rate such that only about two children per couple survive to reproduce. Despite the largely random nature of accidental and environmental deaths, those individuals with the smallest number of mutations enjoyed a greater chance of being among the survivors and quasi-truncation selection could operate." (emphasis mine)